"A Threat to Internet Stability": Home Routers Crashed a European DDoS Protection Service
Experts warn that your website could be next.
Experts warn that your website could be next.
A European DDoS protection provider was hit by an unprecedented attack, reaching a power of 1.5 billion packets per second. The massive wave of traffic originated from thousands of infected IoT devices and MikroTik routers that had been turned into a distributed botnet by malicious actors. The incident was detected and stopped in real-time thanks to the FastNetMon monitoring system, which engaged filtering mechanisms at the router level and available traffic scrubbing capabilities.
Meanwhile, FastNetMon specialists themselves clarified that the attack was a massive UDP flood coming from more than 11,000 networks worldwide. To mitigate it, Access Control Lists (ACLs) on border routers and the capabilities of specialized scrubbing centers were used. These centers analyze packets, implement rate limiting, and apply heuristic methods for anomaly detection. Although the name of the attacked client has not been disclosed, it is known to have been a DDoS filtering service specifically designed to counter such attacks.
The peculiarity of this attack lay in the colossal number of sources involved and the use of consumer-grade network equipment as a weapon. This is not the first such case: just a week earlier, Cloudflare reported on the largest volumetric attack in history, which reached 11.5 Tbps and 5.1 billion packets per second. In both episodes, the attackers aimed to overwhelm data processing resources, which can lead to massive service outages.
Pavel Odintsov, the founder of FastNetMon, stated that the current trend threatens the stability of the global internet. According to him, combating such attacks requires intervention at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level. ISPs must implement mechanisms for filtering outbound traffic before it reaches a critical scale. Without such measures, he emphasized, massively infected user devices will continue to be turned into weapons capable of causing damage to infrastructure on a planetary scale.
